Tough to be transparent when you shut off the lights

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/11/2023 (731 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitobans are out of luck if they want to find out what the wait times are for surgeries and diagnostic tests at publicly funded hospitals.

After two decades of posting online wait-time information for a wide range of hospital procedures, the Manitoba government has wiped the data clean.

For the past two weeks, there has been no publicly available wait-time statistics for procedures such as hip and knee surgery, cataract surgery and diagnostics tests, including MRIs, CT scans and ultrasounds.

That information had been publicly available online since the early 2000s. But when the NDP government shut down the province’s Diagnostic and Surgical Recovery Task Force two weeks ago, it also took down the wait-time data.

So much for openness and accountability.

“The feedback our government had received is that the (task force) dashboard as it existed was not very user friendly, or helpful in understanding the status of various wait times for surgical and diagnostic procedures,” a spokesperson for Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara wrote in an email, when asked why government took down the data.

Instead of leaving it up and replacing it with an improved version at a future date, it was scrubbed altogether. Which means the public is in the dark on the status of wait times for most surgeries and diagnostic tests. The emergency-room wait times published online by the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority are still available. And if you look closely enough, you will find limited information about cancer-surgery wait times. But that’s it. The rest is gone.

Median wait time data for surgeries and diagnostics tests used to be posted online by Manitoba Health. The former Progressive Conservative government’s task force took over that function last year, prompting Manitoba Health to take down its data.

The task force presented the information in a different format than Manitoba Health and included estimated surgical and diagnostic backlogs from the COVID-19 pandemic.

There was nothing wrong with how the new dashboard presented the data. In fact, it was an improvement in some areas. It included four years of data compared with only 13 months Manitoba Health used to present.

“The department and Shared Health are currently considering a new format for sharing updates to wait lists that are both more transparent and also more user-friendly and have a focus that is broader than just COVID backlogs because we knew that backlogs were growing before the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the spokesperson wrote.

That’s no reason to take down the existing data. The public has a right to access that information for a number of reasons. Wait times are broken down by individual hospital, which helps doctors and patients identify where the shortest waits are. The information is also necessary for the public to hold government accountable in how it’s managing health care.

The data also showed how many surgical procedures and diagnostic tests were performed each month — another important accountability measure taxpayers have a right to see.

All of those statistics are now hidden from the public.

Worse, there’s no timeline on when government plans to post the data again. When asked when the statistics would be available online, the spokesperson said no target date has been set.

This is not the kind of openness and transparency the NDP promised voters during the provincial election campaign. Premier Wab Kinew made a solemn pledge to end secrecy in government and to be more accountable to the public than the Tories were. Taking down online data for no good reason and leaving the public in the dark on how long it may take to get hip or knee surgery or an MRI is not more open and transparent, it’s less.

It’s also suspicious. Why does government not want the public to see wait times right now? No one expected the new government to immediately shorten wait lists. It’s going to take months and years to achieve that goal. But the public has a right to monitor the progress, or lack thereof.

It’s not up to government to decide when the public is allowed to have access to that information which, in fact, belongs to the public, not government.

The NDP should immediately repost the existing data sets until it is prepared to unveil a new version of those statistics. There is no reason the public should be deprived of that information.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca